Gus Dapperton has been having a moment for some time now. With his new music videos gaining a few million views in just months, it is easy to forget that he started off the way thousands of aspiring musicians do – sending his home-recorded songs to countless blogs, rarely hearing anything back.
He’s come a long way since his first early rejections. The 21-year old is now a breakout star in the indie music scene, known as much for his bowl cut and fashion sense as for his infectious and dreamy pop songs.
Having risen to fame at such an early age, Dapperton has become something of a symbol of the new wave of independent music, blurring lines between genres, identities and even mediums. Similar to other prominent artists like Rex Orange County and Yellow Days, he has rejected traditional views of pop music, which he finds limiting and dull. Shortly after our interview, Dapperton raucously jumped around on stage to a sold-out show in front of hundreds of screaming youths. But he could not seem further from a typical rockstar at first sight.
“I think everyone on the inside is interested in sincerity”, he tells me. I’d asked if young people are becoming less concerned with what is seen as “cool”. After spending much of his childhood “stunted by people’s opinions”, Dapperton says he realised that people respected his music much more when it was focused on being true rather than “convenient”.
I think everyone on the inside is interested in sincerity
That difficult period of realisation was also what led to his iconic album covers and music videos, full of pastel colours and outlandish outfits. “Basically all it is”, he says, “is kind of going back to when I was a child and listening to whatever my dad was playing around the house”.
It’s this obsessive desire for “authenticity” that produced the dungarees and cumbersome headphones. Dapperton’s look, he wants you to know, is no record company creation.
As for his musical influences, Dapperton’s own take on pop music and “surrealism” stems from his love of the likes of David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen. Despite this, his first musical dabblings were with hip hop beats, rather than a guitar. It’s a musical beginning that still influence how he creates his songs. “When I write a song, I write the entire arrangement right away”, he says. It’s an approach that becomes obvious from re-listening to some of his hits, from “I’m Just Snacking” and “Prune, You Talk Funny”. As is typical for artists of this new generation, Dapperton doesn’t worry too much about what music he listens to – he is as comfortable discussing the intricate lyricism of rappers like MIKE as he is the sparse production of Archy Marshall on A New Place 2 Drown.
Though it may seem like his band sprung out of nowhere, he has put years into perfecting his craft and has spent time learning from his contemporaries since his move to New York. “I like the New York music scene because there’s a lot of different types of music”, he tells me. “I can’t think of one person in the music scene in New York who makes music very similar to someone else.”
Being in such a huge scene can be difficult for an aspiring artists, but Dapperton still holds that focusing on the songwriting, not self-promotion, is the way to get noticed. “Even if you get all the promotion in the world, people still wouldn’t listen to your music if they didn’t like it.”
The world of indie music has been shifting away from guitar-driven rock that dominated the early 2000s for some time now, but the genre’s limitations are still obvious. “I don’t think art can fall all under the same category”, says Dapperton, who has preferred to avoid the standard labels of bedroom pop and lo-fi indie that others have sought to impose on his tracks. Rather than focusing on a sound, he looks to create a certain feeling in his music, preferring to label his dream-like songs and videos as surrealist because “it’s like the broadest term without labelling something”.
I can’t think of one person in the music scene in New York who makes music very similar to someone else
Defying conventions seems important to Dapperton and it can be seen in all aspects of his output. His music videos, which he says allow him to “put the listener in a world that the song was meant to be in” have proved crucial to his success, mirroring the rise of Brockhampton, whose singles became popular YouTube videos long before their release on other streaming services.
Dapperton’s videos are generally created in collaboration with Matthew Dillon Cohen, a filmmaker who rose to prominence with Goldlink’s “Team” video. “It gives them an energy that wasn’t there before”, he says of the effect of videos on listeners. Focusing on a single project has largely become a thing of the past for artists emerging on Bandcamp and Soundcloud, as can be seen by the prolific work of Ricky Eat Acid and Car Seat Headrest.
Despite not having released a full-length project yet, Dapperton’s band has been headlining shows across the world and will continue to do so over the course of the summer. He is leading the way for a new generation of artists using social media, with a healthy dose of sincerity, to connect with new listeners – a quick look through any of his social media accounts will show countless candid interactions with fans.
During the soundcheck, Dapperton plays a cover of “This Charming Man”. It’s appropriate – if the idea of a distant, arrogant rock star is becoming all too antiquated, we might just be witnessing the rise of a new breed of charming pop stars.
